Three to Pre: First Day Jitters

Here we go.

CB's school doesn't start until Thursday, so I was able to sleep in until 7:00 am today and focus on the three little nervous ones.  Okay, maybe not nervous necessarily.  They were a combination of excited and apprehensive, ready for a new adventure and sorry to leave the lazy days of summer.  My emotions mirrored their own.

September of 2012 will kick off a very different year for me, one that opens up about 2 1/2 hours of kidless time in the afternoon five days a week.  Completely new territory and with it comes excitement but also a strange feeling of leaving part of my own identity behind while I carve out a new one.  

Pink is now a third grader which is apparently the year when everything changes.  Things supposedly get much harder academically and the teachers "stop babying them."  Which is completely understandable because at 8 you are obviously all grown up.  

Tink transitions into a full day for the first time and Rella is gone every single afternoon.  

It is all things bittersweet.  

Today kicked-off with a patch work of buses, a great 3 hour meeting with my Dad who I am helping with a writing project, a half-day of school which landed the girls home two hours early to be thrown in the car for a round trip to Maryland to get CB who has been gone for about three weeks.  We closed the day with soccer practice, dinner, baths, the ceremonial messy diaper as CB's way of announcing that she is home, and a stack of school paperwork that I've taken a break from because it's mind numbing.  (By the way, she self-initiated and used the toilet 9 times when she was away with her grandparents so it was disheartening to have her backslide on her first day home, but I'm holding out hope it's just a transitional thing.)

We will all be adjusting to many changes this year, myself included. Yet, I think I'm starting to get more excited about the changes now that they are here upon me.  I think the girls are ready too, despite the fact that one of them didn't have the best first day back.

I'm exhausted and need to finish up three giant packets of paperwork, pack lunches, and lay out clothes.      
It's gonna be a great year - I GOT this.